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Resurrection Ecology Gives Life to Old Eggs
Ant writes "ABC News reports that scientists are bringing the past to life by hatching eggs once thought to be dead and producing colonies of animals as they existed decades ago. They are calling it 'resurrection ecology,' and it's a whole new field that quite literally allows scientists to observe evolution as it occurred, using animals that were quite different than their kinfolk today."
You're using the popular definition of theory. Evolution will *never* be more than a /scientific/ theory. Gravity is "just" a theory, and will never become more than that.
Not exactly. There have been experiments which, for all intents and purposes, have been solid arguments for evolution. The evidence at this point is overwhelmingly present. However, many do not accept it despite the evidence.
I mean, this will still not prove it for most creationists, since it will only show what can happen under closed, controlled conditions. It's never realistic enough to change the lives of the people to whom absolute, totally undeniable proof of evolution would be a faith-shattering experience.
There will always be room for another Scopes Monkey Trial, even today. There are still creationist education groups. It's not like the evidence will be easily accepted by them, either. It will take more than just some simulated ecosystems.
Ultimately, this "new" branch of science can bring a wealth of information about the process of evolution. Think of it... these eggs are possibly hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. They have not gone through the same evolution patterns as their counterpart species; therefore, scientists can examine what they evolved and possibly identify why they evolved in that way.
I did not RTFA, but this is definately something that should be looked into.
We've seen entire ecosystems of one region incredibly damaged by introducing species from another, I can only imagine the damage that will be done by species being introduced from one _time_ to another.
What more is there to be than "just" a theory?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Life when considered in the form of a spore is structure, which when energy (food) is added, becomes life. Life is structure and energy.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The startling point is that we're talking about only 100 years. Given the number of generations the Daphnia can manage in that time, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.
But think: if you can get that much useful change in such a short amount of time, how much more can occur over hundreds of thousands of years?
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Bah, who cares for semantics when you can have sensationalism?
Is it me or does the Red Queen Hypothesis also sound a lot like good ole' survival of the fittest thing that Darwin fella' had put forward?
Hatching long dormant eggs is interesting, I wish the article had more about that in it. I have always been fascinated by the fact that wheat from Pharoh's tombs in Egypt has been sprouted.
However, this article merely takes that interesting subject and attempts yet again to twist it into another prove of the theory of evolution. The mass media does that with any major story in the life sciences area.
This should probably be phrased as: "Can this possibly be used to show that evolution is more than just a theory?"
What more is there to be than "just" a theory?
Evolution is "just" a theory because, although a theory is a statement of what we think something to be like, that includes in itself an inherent understanding that we can't know more than that, that we could always possibly be wrong . . . so evolution has trouble standing up to things like Creationism and it's masquerade/reinvention as "Intelligent Design", which offer eternal and proclaimed truths at their core. They have the gift of certainty; and unreal concreteness is often more persuasive than truthful equivocation.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Yeah, i agree.
It's just stupid evolution has to be dragged into every single discussion about something biology. When biologists say that they have a scientific consensus about the validity of evolution that means its the same when physicists say this about gravity.
The people denying evolution are not lacking evidence, they are lacking education.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Well on a serious note, how do they know that the eggs that were dormant don't have some problem with them in the first place wich is why they were dormant?
I mean, would somethign that was perfectly healthy and able to succed in life be dormant for no reason? If so then has the process of being dormant in any way changed the creature once they are hatched. How do we know what is discovered is any more acurate then the imagination of scientist that already try to point out the differences.
Just wait till researchers bring back a disease that that has been laying dormant for millions of years that wipes the entire human race out.. lol, but i do think what they are doing is cool. I'm sure alot will be learned.
If you guys had taken the time to read the article prior to posting a response, you would have realized the article talks about evolution throughout its entire contents. It then goes on to explain that "sunlight and warmth" (page 3, website) were given to the eggs, and they hatched. This, is NOTHING like Jurassic Park. This is basically just preservation of eggs from long ago which were able to be warmed and hatched many years later. It then talks about how they could see evolution take place within these new life forms. Hopefully, in the future, you guys can appreciate the fact that a submission was made and accepted because it was a genuinely interesting article/topic, rather than another attempt for someone to be the 'first post'. You guys are not trolls, nor do you have to be. That isn't how you get on in life. Being a troll will get you nowhere. If you can troll, then you probably have enough skill to get a job making $10/hour at minimum. Go out there and get that job. If you are a troll making more than that, however, then I look at you in disgust.
Just keep telling yourself how bright you are for not seeing the obvious (the existence of a Creator) and keep denigrating those who you disagree with. Chances are, your boorish personality will prevent you from mating, and the rest of us will just have fewer dumbass secular humanists to deal with.
Now, it's people like this with whom we have to contend. I agree with stating your opinions on the matter in an open forum, but this is just as ignorant as the ignorance he sees in evolutionists.
Sure, there is interesting evidence for creationism, and I'm not denying that. Half of the time, there is misuse of common knowledge (i.e: everything goes toward chaos, so how can something so orderly come about without intelligent design), sometimes the people spout pure nonsense, and once in a while you get to hear a truly educated, clear piece of evidence for creationism. I just can't make the leap of faith required to accept that theory.
There will never really BE an answer, as much as people may bicker. What we should do instead is think more about how we can use this knowledge to benefit us, as these arguments will never get anywhere.
To get an interesting perspective on the matter, though, I definitely recommend reading "The Blind Watchmaker", by Richard Dawkins. It offers some great insight on the matter.
What we see every day is adaptation. A change of "significant difference" would be evolution.
My view on creation is that it was done once, which set all of the rules that scientists are discovering to this day.
Also, show me a mutation that was for the better of the species. All of the mutations I have heard about have been for the worse.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Because there are many facets to what can be defined as the fittest, and these are under constant flux.
A few thousand years ago it was brawn, then it was a combination of both brain and brawn, today it is mostly brain -- but still, good looking folks do find it easier to find mates, due to reasons that go back in the evolutionary chain.
That was my original point.
We do not know what will constitute the "fittest" of tomorrow as we advance as a species and as a civilization, however that does not mean the non-fittest will be wiped out. Yes, maybe they will be -- but not overnight. Over genetic pool is far too interbred and mixed up for something like that to happen.
Fuck. Look at how badly gravity breaks down when you look at it really close. We still can't merge classical mechanics and quantum mechanics....
Let alone the problems classical mechanics face on the macro scale... Think of all of the "massless, invisible, undetectable particles" which have been proposed to explain things like "heat", ... ... and then compare them with the various "dark matter" and "superstring" theories...........
Originally, the scientists thought that they changed to become less apealing to predators, then when predator population died out, they changed back.
The researchers found that the specimens in the lab changed and then later changed back, just as fossil records had shown.
If anything this disproves evolution as the cause.
Did they have predators and competition in the lab? It wasn't mentioned and I highly doubt they recreated the lake.
They removed the predators and the same thing still happened. This disproves their theory.
So why is it so hard to say that the DNA of the specimen was programmed to change in this way over time which had the nice side effect that the predators didn't like the change?
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I mean, you have heard of Albert Einstein and the general theory of relativity? Gravity doesn't exist. It's not a force. It's a pseudo- or false force.
Timespace is curved, and it's that curvature that gives the acceleration. There is no such thing as gravity, just as there is no such thing as centrifugal force.
So there is a consensus on gravity - and that is that it isn't a valid theory.
I'd like to point out that there is no real discussion between evolution vs. creationism, except in the minds of people who misunderstand science. Evolution is a really great theory, just like the General Theory of Relativity is a really great theory. You do know that physicists do not accept it as gospel truth and in fact are looking for a better theory to replace it, right? Aren't biologists looking for a better theory than evolution to replace it one day, or have they accepted it as a religion and begun treating it like a faith?
Creationism is a completely different concept. It doesn't try to explain the origin of the diverse creatures. Believers of creationism instead look towards all things in the world around them and accept it as testament of the glory and intelligence of God. They also accept themselves as created in the image of God as children of God. Many scientists are creationists. That isn't contradictory. They treat science the same way as people did from previous generations: By understanding the natural world around us, we will understand the nature of God, and thus ourselves, better. In fact, for many of these scientist, it was a sort of divine inspiration to discover new intelligence or knowledge. Each point of science, each bit of evidence, each theory that seemed to work, was treated as a gift from God.
Do you see how evolution doesn't even really enter the argument for creationists?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
It sounds to me likely you're dangerously close to treating Wikipedia as an authoritative source. And I certainly don't see how "understanding" life is easy.
The fact that some bacteria have five hundred year long reproduction cycles and that others can survive dormant for thousands of years just shows that natural selection over billions of years produces more advanced creatures than we have done during the mere three hundred years we claim to have been civlized (if you count from the beginning of the industrial revolution - I personally do not view the present world as civilized)
You are incorrect about the time frames. Modern man started breeding plants, animals, and microbes starting roughly 8,000-12,000 years ago. Yeast (used in making of bread and fermentation of carbohydrate rich fluids) seems to be an excellent counterexample to your claim above. Or perhaps the Border Collie or the rat.
Evolution doesn't require similar faith. It requires some faith, because all science does. Faith that if lots of people observe something, we can take it that that thing is actually happening. Faith in cause and effect. Faith that the universe is consistent in the rules it follows, they won't all change tomorrow, and didn't all change yesterday (and when they did change, like the very early universe, there were rules and reasons to it).
Evolution is based on observations, scientists started with some observed facts, came up with a hypothesis and looked for evidence to back it up.
Now, scientists have been wrong in the past, science is a process after all. So far though there hasn't been any alternative hypothesis that holds up nearly as well, while evolution has moved from hypothesis to theory.
Creationism comes from myths and a time when people explained things they didn't understand with magic and gods. People believe in it now because they were taught it, or because it is written in the bible.
There is a difference between believing something because it is the best explanation science currently has to offer, and believing something because it's a very old myth. Of course you can blindly cling to scientific theories irrationally when presented with differing facts, and that is as unreasonable as blindly clinging to religious beliefs when presented with alternate facts.
"Macroevolution" is just "Microevolution" over a long period of time, and not what you said - the spontaneous generation of radically new organisms marked by completely new genes, chromosomes, and physiological characteristics
Given a belief in God and creation what is more likely given the evidence: that God created everything according to the literal interpretation of the bible, but made all this evidence of evolution to [trick us|force us to have to take the bible on faith], or that God created the mechanism of evolution more or less as science describes it and that the bible [should not|does not need to] be taken literally?
In my mind, the later seems more elegant and, following the principle of Occam's Razor, more likely. And surely a creation that essentially creates and evolves itself from the beginning is far more divine than a creation that is designed to last detail? But it's very much a question for religious, not scientific debate.
Where the hell do you people get this stuff?!! You can't see evolution happen?
Try bacteria. If you add, say, a poison to a colony, most of the bacteria die off...some don't. Those which don't - and have a specific set of traits - continue to populate. You end up with a new colony of bacteria which have a specific trait.
That's not enough for most creationists. They want to see the bacteria change into a higher life form or something. If you repeated the process of selective breeding over and over, that's exactly what begins to happen. Dogs seems to have a common ancestor, but different breeds today vary wildly.
What creationists really want, I think, is proof of spontaneous evolution...and even that 'ridiculous' idea has some merit. How about species of frogs which can spontaneously change gender, so that a breeding population can be maintained, etc?
Any sort of religious belief cannot be accepted as undenyable truth by a scientist, because doing so requires him (or her) to accept the core hypotheses on faith. That is antithetical to the scientific process. So while a scientist can certainly have a spiritual bent, he must accept his scientific findings on face value only; e.g. the Theory of Evolution seems to be the best explanation we have, even if he believes that something else is true.
This would give proof of evolution?
How long until the Bush administration puts an end to their research?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Allow me to point out an example where your logic is flawed:
You can breed a kingsnake to a cornsnake and get fertile offspring.
So what? Well, kingsnakes and cornsnakes aren't just different species. They're different GENUSES.
No, they won't breed together on their own... human intervention is absolutely required (otherwise the kingsnake will eat the cornsnake). Yes, they produce fertile offspring. I'm aware of some people who have crossbred as many kingsnake and ratsnake (cornsnakes are ratsnakes) species together as possible. The highest number of different species ancestry in one snake (that I know of) so far is 7. Across two genuses.
Soo... the 'fertile offspring' bit isn't really a good litmus test for determining the boundries of a species.
People who claim that religion and reason are mutually exclusive are themselves ignorant about what religion is.
The people most likely to do this are the religious themselves, typified by creationist groups that seek to get their 'theory' into textbooks as a direct contrast to evolution. If the religious stuck to religion and stopped trying to interfere with or invalidate science we wouldn't even be having this debate.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?